ENGLISH PAINTING
THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH, JOHN CONSTABLE
ART Lesson 3: The aim of the lesson is to teach you to explain the historical and psychological
peculiarities that influenced the development of art in England.
1. Read the following pieces of information and use them to give an introduction to your
lecture on English painting:
a) The general character of English painting is defined for us by the work of great individuals.
In Hogarth its inclination towards the illustration of social life has a supreme example. In
Gainsborough, there is all of a native poetry of feeling. Devoting to landscape, ranging from a
patriotic delight in the local scene to a romantic sense of far horizons, is summed up by
Constable and Turner. An imaginative vein, warring at times with the observant description of
natural fact, find its exemplar in Blake. In none of these aspects can English painting be called
“classical”. Its excellence is of a different kind from that which belongs to the European tradition,
the grandeur of the Renaissance and Baroque art, the lucidity of aesthetic aim and reasoning
which so distinguishes French painting. It takes on in the course of time the complexity and
waywardness which are rather to be termed “romantic”.
b) Some of the greatest masters were attracted to England by rewards, honours as well as
titles conferred upon them by the English court. Holbein, Rubens, Van Dyck were almost English
painters during a longer or a shorter period of their life. Van Dyck, who died in London, is really
the father of the English portrait school. However, not until William Hogarth do we find a painter
so truly and violently English. Van Dyck set a aristocratic ideal before the English portrait.
Hogarth broke off with the Great style. His first works date from 1730. For rather more than a
century England was to see a brilliant succession of geniuses: Reynolds, Gainsborough,
Lawrence, Constable and Turner, responding to the highest aspirations of their motherland. No
country has ever has such a strongly marked love of the portrait. England was deprived of the
religious painting by the Reformation. Mythology met with no better fate. Decorative painting is
scarcely found.
In portrait painting is one of the glories of English art, landscape is another: in both
directions it rose to supreme heights. In the very spirit of the pictures we feel sincerity from the
depths of the national temperament.
The third characteristic of the English school is the moral strain which goes back to the old
Puritan tradition. It favours a conception of art close to that of a novel. Sometimes it leans
towards the pamphlet which is often one of the forms of the English novel. This moral sprit
alternating between utilitarian moralism and poetic fantasy has produced artists original in their
force and singularity and quite unparalleled elsewhere.
2. Thomas Gainsborough’s (1727-1788) professional career began in 1750. He executed a great
many small-sized portraits as well as landscapes of a decorative nature. His output includes
about 800 portraits and more than two hundred landscapes.
Although his art fitted the broad canons of the 18 th century pictorial style it is not possible
to discover in Gainsborough any attempt to perfect nature or to put it onto an ideal plane. Since
he was no theoretician, Gainsborough did not aim to formulate a new concept of nature. He
consented himself with a sensuous response to her stimulus, without running the risk of spoiling
the charm and spontaneity of nature by indulging in idealisation or mannerism. “The landscape
in Gainsborough is soothing, tender, and affecting. The stillness of noon, the depths of twilight,
and the dews and pearls of the morning, are all to be found on the canvases of this benevolent
and kind-hearted man,” said Constable.
As far as Gainsborough’s technique is concerned, it may be noted that in many of his
paintings, both landscapes and portraits, he uses atmosphere in order to cast a clear light on his
subject and sharpen outlines. In many others he prefers chiaroscuro, indefinite tones, contrasts
of light and shade - that is to say, all those effects which do not serve as a basis for the study of
light, but rather stimulate the sensibility. Contrasts of light and shade in a context of flowing,
curved and broken lines, produce an impression of animation and mobility which is the
characteristic of Gainsborough’s art. This mobility is directly connected with the technique of
seizing an effect in a rapid stroke.
Describe a landscape by Gainsborough.
3. Although Gainsborough considered that his particular bent was for landscape, his official art
is portraiture. The particular discovery of Gainsborough was the creation of a form of art in
which the sitters and a background merge into a single entity. The landscape is not kept in the
background, but in most cases men and nature are fused in a single whole through the
atmospheric harmony of mood. This method of placing the sitter in direct contact with the
landscape was certainly a most effective answer to rhetorical portraiture where a figure in a
historical attitude, was placed in relief against a background of minor importance. This was a
distinct innovation at a time when the whole tradition was to highly praise an ideal and historical
concept of beauty, to abandon nature and embrace artificiality. Each of Gainsborough’s portraits
is distinct and individual, even though, taken as a whole, they depict an entire society in its
significant manifestations. In the portrait of “Robert Andrews and Mary, his Wife”, for example,
the beauty of the green English summer is communicated to the viewer through the sense of well-
being and delight which the atmosphere visibly creates in the sitters. Gainsborough shows the
pleasure of resting on a plain wooden bench in a cool shade of an oak tree, while all around the
ripe harvest throbs in a hot atmosphere enveloped by a golden light. The men and women
portrayed in Gainsborough’s paintings are themselves not immune from the cyclic rhythm of the
seasons. This factor of instability is mainly responsible for creating the “natural portrait”.
Describe a portrait by Gainsborough stressing the peculiarities of his treatment of
man and nature.
4. Read the information about John Constable (see the supplement) and speak about the most
important characteristic features of his style than make him unique and recognisable.
5. Describe a picture by Constable showing his approach to natural reality.
